Payal - that would depend very much on what you wanted to do and why. You could perform a content analysis of documents - either as a quantitative, retrospective, observational design - looking statistically at frequency of patterns. More likely, you could perform a qualitative content/thematic analysis - but that would be to uncover 'narrative themes' - not to understand a style of writing. Another alternative, would be a discourse analysis. My PhD was partly a Derridean discourse analysis - and I think that it is the best example presented here to achieve what you propose - based on the limited information provided. It would essentially be a philosophical critique of business and its organisation itself though.
Dean, I agree with you - a content analysis of texts or corpora of texts should indeed take into account the different levels constituting a text: the thematic level, the narrative one, the rhetoric and discursive one and also the different levels of expression: expression modalites of content and formal organization of content in the sense of lay out design, interface, etc. This is a semiotic approach of (broadly speaking) textual objects.
Good response Peter. It lends itself far more to the qualitative narrative (which is probably where Payal should focus her efforts) than the quantitative number-crunching approach.
Many thanks Dean and Peter for your valuable advice. I will keep these in mind. Also do you think the software Nvivo can help in this type of analysis?
Payal - that would also depend on a number of factors. We don't yet know what type of analysis you intend
To be honest, am a novice, yet, in content analysis . Still trying to work out a research design for the business letters i have
It's always good to be honest Payal. Probably best to ask again on this thread when you have a little more detail.
Writing styles can mean many different things to different people. However, if you had to determine variables that can be quantified in e-memos and letters, I suggest that you focus on the established main categories of rhetoric and composition:
1. Code the letters and e-memos for rhetorical appeals: emotion, logic, credibility and time or urgency.
2. Code the letters and e-memos for purpose: persuasive, informative or entertainment.
3. Code the letters and e-memos for figures of speech: stylistic touches in written text used by the writer to heighten the ordinary mundane language to the elevated; for example, metaphors, allusion, allegory, personification, and simile are examples of stylistic touches common in written texts.
Quantification of these main categories of written language would then make your data amenable to statistical analyses. You could also collect data on the demographic information of the composer of the letters and e-memos. You could perform a number of Chi-Square analyses on the relative frequency and percent of this type of data.
Thanks Reginald for the detailed response That does make things more clear
Do you have a working definition of business writing style (factors and/or categories)? That would really help us address your particular research.
In the meantime there are a few coding schemes available free at http://profilerplus.org for research use. In particular, Verbal Behavior Analysis may suit your needs. You may also want to play with LIWC http://www.liwc.net/tryonline.php
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